An overview on Meta-learning approaches for Few-shot Weakly-supervised Segmentation

Semantic segmentation is a difficult task in computer vision that have applications in many scenarios, often as a preprocessing step for a tool. Current solutions are based on Deep Neural Networks, which often require a large amount of data for learning a task. Aiming to alleviate the strenuous data-collecting/annotating labor, research fields have emerged in recent years. One of them is Meta -Learning, which tries to improve the generability of models to learn in a restricted amount of data. In this work, we extend a previous paper conducting a more extensive overview of the still under -explored problem of Few-Shot Weakly-supervised Semantic Segmentation. We refined the previous taxonomy and included the review of additional methods, including Few-Shot Segmentation methods that could be adapted to the weak supervision. The goal is to provide a simple organization of literature and highlight aspects observed in the current moment, and be a starting point to foment research on this problem with applications in areas like medical imaging, remote sensing, video segmentation, and others.& COPY; 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.